Enterprises often employ large, complex, computing environments that include a number of enterprise components such as servers, rooters, databases, repositories, mainframes, personal computers, business applications and enterprise management software, for example. Such enterprises may include legacy desktop applications which were designed to operate in a limited environment, such as on a single personal computer, for example. Data managed by a legacy desktop application may be useful to support other business processes or applications within an enterprise, but the data may be unavailable to such other processes or applications due to the closed or proprietary architecture of the legacy desktop application.
Typically, data from a legacy desktop application is stored in a native format which may not be easily accessible by an enterprise application. In instances where the data from a desktop legacy application is not accessible by other applications and/or processes within the enterprise, a database server on a network may be utilized to make the data accessible to such other applications and/or processes. However, when transforming such legacy desktop applications into enterprise-compatible applications often, a majority of the data layer and/or a majority of the application may need to be rewritten. In extreme instances, the application may have to be redesigned from scratch. Such changes can involve a significant development effort, and may be undesirable due to backward compatibilities associated with the new requirements of on line operation of desktop applications.
The prior art systems and methods for managing native application data are not sufficient to enable businesses efficiently to make use of legacy desktop application data. Specifically, there is not presently a method or system that enables enterprise access to native legacy desktop application data without affecting the data layer and/or native format of the data. Further, current solutions to the problems of making native application data available to other applications and/or processes within an enterprise are time consuming, require significant redevelopment of the legacy application, and/or cannot be reused and threaten the backward compatibility of the legacy application.